Melinda Tankard Reist has spent the past decade exposing the sexualisation of girls and women by corporations and advertisers, campaigning against exploitation, and educating those with duties of care. Here she explains how girls and boys are impacted by the pornified, digitally-saturated context they’re growing up in. The reality she exposes is confronting, but one we must face and oppose to provide the nurturing environment children need.
Melinda Tankard Reist
She twists and twirls, gyrates and smiles coyly. Her uniform is crop top, tiny shorts, the accoutrements of early adolescence. Sometimes she sucks a lollypop, or cuddles soft toys playfully sticking her tongue out. Always she looks like she’s having fun. Always she attracts attention.
Thousands of men tell her she’s hot, gorgeous, cute, both a baby girl and a goddess who drives them wild. They worship at her virtual altar with purple eggplants and droplets of water. Can you pose like this? They can’t get enough.
As brought to you by a mainstream porn site? No, as routinely seen on Instagram.
This girl is 12-years-old. She has a mass following on her Instagram page and numerous offshoot ‘fan’ pages erected in adoration.
The eroticisation of the girl child for paedophilic fantasies is now mainstreamed. Instagram serves as a paedophile directory, fetishising underage girls and facilitating their solicitation.
And it’s not only hordes of excited males amassing to pay her homage – companies descend on her as well, delighted to commodify her adolescent, smooth-skinned body and fresh, filter-prettified face, with their brands. Some especially popular girls are so thoroughly tagged with sponsor brand names, the black lettering appears like ants criss-crossing their bodies.
We wonder how she ended up here; feted by adult male e-johns[1] bearing ejaculation emojis.
But our barely pubertal girl child didn’t just drop into Instagram this way. She was groomed for her role years in advance.
When she could walk, she tottered along through shopping centres with her mother where pornified portrayals of women greeted her at every turn.
As she grew, she learnt quickly that certain bodies got more attention. Less clothed. More on show, streamlined, no excess fat, ‘hot’. She followed the most popular celebrities, saw the Kardashians spruiking diet lollypops. Now in kindergarten, she joined her little friends imitating Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘WAP’, a porn-script to a hip-hop beat (‘whores in the house!’ exclaim the children in unison) .[2]
Though in part still child-like, our little girl is inculcated with adult sexuality. While not understanding sex, or having sexual desires, she absorbs the message that her sexualised body is her currency – her passport for virtual and IRL (in real life) success – now pretty much the same – so she learns how to perform it.
Well before understanding her sexuality. Well before her first clumsy kiss. Well before knowing her own desires.
And that’s when she lands on Instagram – this global repository for images of today’s aspiring young models, gymnasts, dancers and actors – to be met with a virtual feeding frenzy of men with a voracious appetite for fresh young flesh.
We have been destroying cultural norms that once taught male adults that children’s bodies were off-limits. The ‘minor love erotic community’ no longer needs to gather at the internet’s fringes, they have been brought into the mainstream digital fold where creeping on underage girls is a routine pastime.
While outrage against paedophiles is frequently expressed, the cultural underpinnings normalising sexual interest in children have not been recognised and condemned as broadly. As I wrote a few years ago in the Sydney Morning Herald:
There is deep distress in the community that defenceless children are used in such evil ways. But the broader culture that encourages the abuse of the children goes unaddressed. The same loathing that is directed toward child sexual abuse has not been extended to the mainstream promotion of paedophilic fantasies for profit.[3]
Over the past two years, we at Collective Shout have forensically (and painfully) documented the predatory behaviour openly exhibited on Instagram. Instagram operates as a virtual auction block for girls. Fans are directed to Patreon and Boosty for subscriber-only content where patrons can access exclusive material: pics, videos, birthday shout outs and personal replies to comments along with calendars and bikini posters.
Often a girl’s own mother – the primary nurturer – runs her account. The parent appears to give no consideration to the ethics of pimping their underage daughter on social media in their desire to advance their ‘model’ daughter in the virtual marketplace: ‘Watch [*my very own daughter] wash the dog in her bikini – subscribe here!’ We wonder, do they not consider where their children’s images end up? Perhaps they are living vicariously through their daughter’s popularity, enjoying her fame, and attention. The money and free products digital success brings can serve to mute conscience. Crystal Abidin explores the rise of parents ‘justifying young digital labor’ in what she calls the ‘attention economy’: ‘Their young lifestyles as depicted on digital estates become vessels that are deliberately curated to maximize advertorial potential… purposefully commodity-and exposure-driven’.[4]
And of course, these parents are also products of the culture we are dissecting here, influenced by norms that have come to be accepted as part of it.
The ‘minor love erotic community’…have been brought into the mainstream digital fold.
The girls don’t understand the consequences of this content being shared (and how will they feel years later when they do?) but those on whom the responsibility for nurturing of our young has been bestowed must not become complicit.
This idea that the worth of girls lies in their performative sexuality has become a super spreader event. It is a long way from our understanding of nurture. It is closer to causing a failure to thrive. This mass saturation carries physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, dis-ease.
The eroticising of child sexual abuse and exploitation is happening in plain sight.
As my UK colleague Jen Izaakson writes, ‘Porn is no longer an industry of its own, but permeates all levels of society, homes, schools, workplaces’.[5] This embedding of porn culture impacts every young person and demonstrates our collective failures in the ‘nurturing of youth’ project.
One effect of porn’s socialisation is its contribution to the erosion of empathy and de-sensitisation to cruelty.
These accounts were shared with me in over a time period of less than 24 hours on Facebook.
‘My 10-year-old granddaughter was approached by a boy while waiting for the school bus and asked, “Do you do arse?’’’
‘My 8-year-old found a note in her school bag which read, “Ready for sex?’”
‘An 8 yr old boy told my 8 yr old girl he wanted to “f**k you hard”.’
‘10 yr old boy told my 10 yr old daughter that he was going to break in and rape her.’
Increasing numbers of girls and young women tell me of being sexually harassed, pressured, coerced, or sexually abused. They describe multiple experiences of sexual intrusion including being groped or rubbed up against in the corridors, often endured daily. They think being hassled for nudes[6] or sent ‘dick pics’ and live masturbation videos is normal. When girls complain about demands to send nudes, the popular response is: ‘Millions of porn sites in the world and he asks for your nudes. B*tch be grateful’.
Girls at one of the last schools I visited in NSW before the current lockdowns told me boys at their (Christian) school simulated masturbation in their presence, with hand sanitiser bottles. Hundreds of girls told me boys making sexual moaning and grunting noises in the classroom was an everyday experience they endured (with younger boys imitating the bigger boys). Girls experience fear and suffer injuries after boys have tried porn-inspired sex acts –including strangulation – on them.[7]
‘KinkTok’, a popular genre within TikTok, (where more than 30 percent of users are minors), promotes choking, whipping, bondage, sadism and submission. At a time when consent and respectful relationships education is being discussed with a sense of urgency to try to stem a sexual assault crisis, we see the growing popularity of the ‘consensual/non-consensual’ (con-non-con) genre, also known as ‘rape play’. How can consent education compete with a trending ‘KinkTok’ hashtag with 6.2 billion views?
The author of ‘Porn survey 2019: how internet pornography is changing the way we have sex’ wrote:
As our survey shows, for gen Z (those aged 22 and under), “rough sex” – hair-pulling, biting, slapping, choking and other aggressive behaviour – was the second most popular porn category. Almost half (42%) of those aged under 23 stated that it was something they enjoyed watching. No other generation came close…
‘Porn has left me never wanting conventional sex,’ said one respondent. Another added: ‘It makes me try to push the boundaries of what my girlfriend wants’. [8]
Pornography and its porn culture offshoots – have created a wrecking ball that is destroying healthy relational expression and intimacy.
This is what the grooming of a generation by the mainstreaming of pornography looks like.
Adults have vacated the space. We have allowed the dismantling of a secure base of attachment: the need for connection, support and nurturing remains unfulfilled, resulting in a mental, emotional and spiritual health crisis. Our children are hardwired to connect. They need ‘close connections to other people, and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning’.[9] Loving, nurturing relationships set them up for flourishing in life – and are the basis of civil society and social cohesion (which are currently fragmenting before our eyes).
Jean M. Twenge is the author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That means for the Rest of us. She observed ‘abrupt shifts in teen behaviours and emotional states’[10] which she attributes to the introduction of mobile phones. Writing in The Atlantic, she says:
Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones…the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.[11]
Twenge explains that teens are spending more time on screens and less hanging out with their peers. As a result, their feelings of loneliness and depression have increased.[12]
Along with increasing loneliness, anxiety and depression, self-harm for females aged 10-14 presenting to emergency departments in the US increased by a massive 189 percent from 2009 to 2014; for young women 15-19 the increase was 62% (the real numbers self-harming are likely to be even higher given this study only measured ED admissions). The authors of research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted youth suicide rates also increased ‘most notably after 2006 with females aged 10 to 14 years experiencing the greatest increase’.[13]
Facebook whistle-blower and former high level executive Frances Haugen’s recent revelations about the operations of the company reverberated around the world. They also brought closer attention to the links between social media and the mental health of teen girls especially. Big Tech was facing its ‘Big Tobacco moment’ said Democrat senator Richard Blumenthal, chair of the congressional committee which heard Haugen’s evidence early October.[14] She had observed a troubling pattern of behaviour in her two years working as a product manager at Facebook. The company repeatedly made decisions to incentivize profits and growth over its users’ well-being. Haugen alleged that the social media giant bears some responsibility for a wide range of societal ills.[15] Among the evidence she leaked to the Wall Street Journal was internal research showing the corporate was aware of the mental health harms it caused, especially to teen girls on Instagram.
Lindsay Crouse, reporting on the story for the New York Times, wrote:
…the whistle-blower was citing the company’s own research, which among other things found that, based on surveys, ‘Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,’ as The Wall Street Journal reported. (Ms. Haugen provided internal documents to The Journal from Facebook, which owns Instagram.) …
For girls now, things have changed. They’re largely worse. Social media platforms such as Instagram feel like algorithmic free-for-alls, full of images of people who have altered how they look, whether by using online filters or in real life, with dieting, surgery or both. In the feed, influencers’ and celebrities’ photos are interspersed with photos of your friends and yourself. Now any photo is subject to scrutiny, comparison and assessment in the form of likes and comments.
To some extent, the way these dynamics play out on Instagram is just a natural extension of how girls are treated in our culture anyway. The body positivity movement may have helped, but girls still internalize the message that part of their success in life will rest upon their ability to be admired for their appearance. Instagram measures ‘nd gamifies that — creating a virtual high school cafeteria as global as the ‘explore” button, one that’s peopled by countless unreal bodies…[16]
Journalist Derek Thompson described social media as ‘attention alcohol’.[17] Writing in The Atlantic, he noted that ‘Like booze, social media seems to offer an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, disorientation, and, for some, dependency’.[18]
Observations like these make it clear that those who are most vulnerable need to be protected rather than preyed upon.
We have permitted the institutionalising of disconnection, the normalising of disposable connections: attached to devices rather than real human beings, our children are lonelier than ever. We have allowed their marination in a poisoned pixel environment which harms emotional relatedness.
The de-personalised view of relationships and sexuality impacting our young people illustrates our failure to nurture our young with healthy messages about respect, intimacy, authentic connection and mutuality. We have failed to prevent the hijacking of their emotions and feelings; enabling an attachment to objects (devices) rather than real human beings. Where will they learn of transcendence, beauty, meaning, purpose and ethics of interpersonal connections and how to integrate empathy into relationships? Will we allow them to be robbed of loving intimate experiences?
An honest cultural audit would force us to face the ill-effects of the social experiment being conducted on our young and demand we not abandon kids to a high-tech quagmire of pornography and the memeification of violence.[19]
But there are signs of hope: more are speaking out globally. The world’s largest disperser of pornography has been called to account,[20] and there are at last moves to establish proof-of-age protections to help stop children accessing on-line porn.[21]
An honest cultural audit would force us to face the ill-efects of the social experiment.
There is growing interest in social capital beyond market capital; a growing desire to stop the strip mining of common core values. Markets depend ‘on non-market institutions, on trust, on relationships between people and within communities, on norms and good behaviour, on social capital. Destroy that and not only do you destroy efficiency, but you also destroy the conditions for a good life’.[22] Socially regressive business systems which encourage excessive and mindless consumption are now questioned.[23]
And most important, there are sign of hope that many young people still have a desire for authentic, intimate, loving relationships. They know the world we have made for them is making them sick. More girls are resisting sexualised scripts that reduce them to their bodies. “We have a right to say no” they tell me. More young men are rejecting harmful cultural messages about masculinity and seeking something better.
As adults we need to acknowledge our own digitally-deformed lives and the bad examples we have set around our compulsive, un-thinking use of technology. Then we need to own our failure to impart nurturing values, meaning and connection to our children by letting Big Tech become their primary educator with too heavy a hand in their formation. We must support their own resistance efforts. Re-committing ourselves to the social compact, we must move into a new world of intense human relations, face-to-face connection, elevated mutuality, and overwhelming practices of love and care. Anything else does not bear contemplating.
Action on these pressing issues is required by us all. The vastness of the disaster requires a whole-of-community approach.
Corporate players need to be exposed and their inordinate power reigned in.
Governments need to acknowledge that their complacency and inaction has allowed the problem to thrive: we need our leaders to account for offloading their ethical responsibilities to citizens.
Families must do all within their power to disrupt this influence on their children.
Individuals can engage in campaigns to address the sexualisation of children and protect them from porn, and be vocal in calling out inappropriate content. The Collective Shout website provides resources and opportunities for taking action in these ways.
Join Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation. Your voice counts and helps us achieve change!
Melinda Tankard Reist, ‘A predator’s playground: Keeping Kids Safe On-line’, MTR, September 15, 2021
Specifically faith-based resources for church leaders, parents, couples and schools can be found here.
Publica.org Ltd is Christian in motivation but secular in orientation, focusing on the common good of all Australians. It aims to promote public policy initiatives: to explore ways in which civil society and local churches, can partner with differing levels of government and NGOs to support stable and nurturing families; and to disseminate a research-based understanding of causes of family instability, relationship destroying behaviours, and social isolation, with a particular focus on reaching under 25s.
I highly recommend Raising Kids Who Care: Practical conversation for exploring stuff that matters, together (598Press, 2021), a new book by Susy Lee. Susy writes “If parents and caregivers are not intentional about developing the caring side of a child’s nature, then our culture will tell them what to care about – and we may not like it!…[It is] the quality of their relationships that determine their quality of life…family, church and community relationships model these skills, but we can be even more intentional about building them”.
This book helps parents curb harmful cultural influences, and as I wrote in my endorsement: ‘offers timely help on raising emotionally intelligent, ethical, sensitive and empathetic children who will act for the common good and make a difference in the world’. See also: Susy Lee ‘Four ways to grow kids who actually care’, Eternity News, June 22, 2021
Originally published in CASE: A quarterly publication of the Centre for Christian Apologetics, Scholarship and Education at New College, University of New South Wales. No. 63/2021
[1] ‘Johns’ are men who purchase women in the sex industry for sex. The expression ‘e-johns’ refers to online ‘punters’/predators.
[2] Melinda Tankard Reist, ‘WAP: High production porn with a hip hop beat’. Collective Shout. September 2, 2020 collectiveshout.org/wap (all URLs accessed October 2021).
[3] Melinda Tankard Reist, ‘The dark world of paedophilia exposed’, Sydney Morning Herald, April 13, 2014 https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-dark-world-of-paedophilia-exposed-20140413-zqu8v.html#ixzz2yqwvA3Kf
[4] Crystal Abidin, ‘SM+S (social media + society). SAGE, April-June 2017, pp1-15 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305117707191
[5] Jen Izaakson ‘Belle Delphine: Product of a culture that eroticises children and monetises their sexualisation’, Collective Shout, March 5, 2021 https://www.collectiveshout.org/belle_delphine_culture_eroticises_children?fbclid=IwAR1h8lZoCR1xXRkeQTBpw4VfDg9RZMMH6n0cgpI_s3Y0whmPGq5AZn9Yj60
[6] The UK child watchdog Offsted recently reported girls were asked for nudes by up to 11 boys a night. https://www.bbc.com/news/education-57411363
[7] See ‘Growing up in Pornland: Girls have had it with porn conditioned boys’ ABC Religion & Ethics. www.abc.net.au/religion/consent-education-does-not-stand-a-chance-against-pornography/13231364
[8] India Knight, ‘Porn survey 2019’, The Times, August 11, 2019
[9] The Commission on Children at Risk, Hardwired to Connect: The new scientific case for authoritative communities (Broadway, 2003). Summary available at www.catholiceducation.org/en/marriage-and-family/parenting/hardwired-to-connect-the-new-scientific-case-for-authoritative-communities-executive-summary.html. These ideas are echoed in National Research Council (US) and Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development, Jack P. Shonkoff & Deborah A. Phillips, Eds (National Academies Press (US), 2000) – ‘Children are born wired for feelings…early environments matter and nurturing relationships are essential.’
[10] Atria Books, New York, 2017.
[11] Jean M. Twenge, ‘Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?’, The Atlantic, September
[12] ‘Teen screen time linked to feelings of loneliness: The importance of spending time with friends.’ https://abcnews.go.com/Health/teen-screen-time-linked-feeling-loneliner-important-spend/story?id=61880116
[13] Melissa C. Mercado, Kristin Holland, Ruth W. Leemis, ‘Trends in Emergency Department Visits for Nonfatal Self-inflicted Injuries Among Youth Aged 10-24 Years in the United States, 2001-2015’. JAMA, 2017 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2664031
[14] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/10/05/big-tech-is-facing-big-tobaccos-moment-of-reckoning-sen-blumenthal.html
[15] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122
[16] ‘Lindsay Crouse, ‘For Teen Girls: Instagram is a Cesspool’, The New York Times, October 8, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/opinion/instagram-teen-girls-mental-health.html
[17] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/social-media-attention-alcohol-booze-instagram-twitter/620101/
[18] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/social-media-attention-alcohol-booze-instagram-twitter/620101/
[19] Ellie Fry, ‘TikTok, Netflix’s ‘365 Days’ and the memeification of violent sex by generation Z’, Independent, August 21, 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/tiktok-365-days-netflix-rough-sex-defence-film-domestic-abuse-a9677051.html
[20] https://www.collectiveshout.org/media_release_cs_backs_push_criminal_investigation_mindgeek
[21] https://www.collectiveshout.org/media_release_gov_support_for_age_verification
[22] Patricia Hewitt, Deputy Chair of the Commission on Social Justice in the United Kingdom in Kraemer & Roberts, 1996: xi
[23] Greg Teague, ‘We can’t solve the sexual assault problem unless we solve the porn problem’, Mercatornet,August 4, 2021 https://mercatornet.com/we-cant-solve-the-sexual-assault-problem-unless-we-solve-the-porn-problem/7381
One Response
I am a Japanese who has been working on this issue since June 2021.
The Government of Japan’s activities on this issue are reporting fake to the United Nations.
The Government of Japan has declared protection for this issue domestically and continues to allow all expressions.
I reported to the United Nations in March 2022, but it seems that it has not been dealt with yet.